Black Genius Spectrum - Toni Morrison
Celebrated by her peers as a writer who “advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and collective intelligence as a people,” Toni Morrison was a master of language and storytelling. Weaving dynamic and complex worlds that spoke to the heart of African-American life with breathtaking poetry, Morrison, as poignantly stated by Elizabeth Alexander, created a universe with every sentence.
Toni Morrison was the author of 11 novels, several non-fiction works and children’s books, two plays, two short stories, a song cycle, an opera and numerous essays. Through each work, she helped us to feel seen and represented in worlds that were deeply rooted and unapologetically ours.
As a literary giant, Morrison garnered an extensive list of accolades including the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for her novel Song of Solomon. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and was later made into a film which starred and was co-produced by Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey also featured four of Morrison’s works as part of her legendary Oprah’s Book Club. In 1993, she became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1996, she was honored with the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. She was also awarded the American Library’s Coretta Scott King Award in 2005. In 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and in 2020, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She has won two NAACP Image Awards, garnered two Grammy nominations, and received numerous honorary degrees.
Earning her B.A. in English from Howard University-- where she studied under Alain Locke, and an M.A. in English from Cornell University, Morrison would later return to her alma mater Howard University as an educator from 1957-1965. While there, she taught Claude Brown, Andrew Young, and Stokely Carmichael – individuals who would later become prominent figures in literature and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. In 1989, Morrison joined the faculty of Princeton University as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University with a joint appointment in African American Studies and Creative Writing.
As a senior editor at Random House, she helped to ensure that our voices were heard by publishing important works by Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, Huey P. Newton, and Muhammad Ali. She also worked to ensure that our history was told through projects such as “The Black Book” – a three century compendium of African-American history.
With the passing of Morrison in 2019, her legacy and contributions continue to be celebrated through organizations such as The Toni Morrison Society and director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ 2019 film Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (a must see). In addition to influencing generations of writers, her impact can also be felt across genres and disciplines. She has influenced visual artists such as Kara Walker, who worked with Morrison on her opera “Margaret Garner” and a limited-edition art book “Five Poems.” It is also present in the work of Mickalene Thomas who created the opening sequence for Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Musically, it can be found in songs like Black Star’s “Thieves in The Night” and albums such as Jason Moran’s The Sound Will Tell You.
Much like the 48 Black Writers who wrote in praise of Toni Morrison, we are grateful for our ‘Beloved’ Toni Morrison and the many ways that she took “the pieces that we are, gathered them and gave them back to us in all the right order.”